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Longbow was created to observe the Zhodani Core Expeditions, and, after many decades of data accumulation and calibration was actually able to measure the Zhodani shipping activity along the core axis. Because sensor signatures propagate at the speed of light, the observations were not in real time. Rather, the deeper into the core the sensors “looked,” the older the signatures.

The Longbow collector plane was located in the Depot (Lishun 1219) system AKA Dynam (world) as part of a sprawling Imperial Navy facility there, aiding in its concealment. The collector plane is a disk of billions of linked receiver elements 42,000,000 kilometers in diameter. This collector yielded a resolution at 1,500 parsecs of 10 meters in long-wavelength infrared and half of a meter in visible light, (meaning that objects larger than 50 centimeters could be distinguished and two objects larger than 50 centimeters apart could be distinguished as two objects).

According to the Imperial Navy public relations office, the collector was dismantled when the project was shut down.